Solarpunk Urbanism

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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.

Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.

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Thoughts about electric quad bikes for 'ruralism'? (s3.amazonaws.com)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml to c/urbanism@slrpnk.net

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I'm a country boy all my life. I can't cycle or take the metro anywhere. Walkable cities are great but they're a hundred miles away.

Everyone goes on about how they hate cars, but what else are you supposed to do?

https://electrek.co/2023/12/04/livaq-equad-unveiled-as-most-capable-electric-atv-ever/ – this article talks about something with a 108km/h and a range of 273 km. It's mad expensive unfortunately, but that is normally to do with adoption rates and scale.

(It says "claims a range of 170 miles (273 km) from its 15.4 kWh battery pack", which implies consumption of about 55 watt-hours per km travelled, though that'd be variable depending on speed and conditions)

If I had one of these, I could get to town, get to a train station, without a car. I could carry one child, which is worse than a car, but the energy consumption is a 3-4× lower than a car. If train stations had swappable batteries, that would be ideal, but I don't see that coming any time soon.

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[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Unless you’re looking for the off-road capabilities this doesn’t seem like the most practical way to get around.

For 1-2 passengers and limited cargo electric motorcycles or mopeds are likely the best option.

If you need to regularly carry more passengers or cargo, the more conventional EVs will make sense.

As others have pointed out, the anti-car movement is mainly focused on cities and urban design because using cars as the dominant mode of transit there just doesn’t make sense. But that doesn’t mean they’re bad in every scenario. Living in a remote area without a fast vehicle seems impractical to me, so I would just focus on making sure it’s powered by renewable energy and operated safely.

That said, I would argue that other urbanist ideas like dense town centers might still make sense in rural areas. Unless you’re engaged in agriculture or some other activity that needs acreage, concentrating living space, goods, and services into a smaller area just makes good sense. This is the way all small towns were built throughout the entirety of human history until the last 100 years.